This childhood fantasia didn’t happen by accident: some of it is the result of urban-design investments made by Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and his wife, Anne Wojcicki (pronounced Wo--skee), the most important couple in town—and perhaps the most prominent young couple in Silicon Valley.

“People were like, ‘Oh, Anne, you Wall Street girl.’ ” (Neither Brin nor Wojcicki responded to questions from )In Brin, Wojcicki found another child of baby-boomer academics who could see beyond academia’s cautious, elitist approach to discovering new knowledge, a slow process in which researchers propose a hypothesis, organize an experiment to collect data, submit findings to peer review, and finally, many months later, gain publication in an esoteric journal.

Brin and Wojcicki are pioneers of a different model, with enormous potential in both its reach and its speed: they look to advanced, Web-based tools and large data sets as the key to solving problems, from how to target advertising to discovering the drugs to treat cancer.

She has a comedian’s sense of timing and a propensity for sharing her emotions widely on social media.

She went to the same boarding school as the Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Eugenie.